BACKTALK; Search for Sensitivity Means Leaving Jock Label Behind

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UNTIL he rolled off the top of the Kensico Dam, Ed Gallagher offered himself to the world as a "meat man," a 6-foot-6-inch, 275-pound former offensive lineman who loved to hit hard, drive drunk and use women like Kleenex.

The mask came off in his suicide note. He wrote: "The way I lived my life, I think death is deserving of me. I don't know how to handle the pain anymore."

"I was a pretty sensitive guy," Gallagher said last week, laughing. "I wrote poems, only I called them songs because poem sounded sissy. I created my body as armor against the world. Useful but eventually destructive. I got trapped inside."

At the bottom of his 110-foot "fall from grace," Gallagher broke his neck. He is in a wheelchair now, a quadriplegic, but in some ways he feels liberated. "I used to be emotionally paralyzed," he said. "Joe Macho, John Wayne. I tried to match my image to the beer commercials. The jock.

"I feel sorrier for the person I was than for me now. If I could reach back, I'd hug me and say, 'Kid, you're a human being of which there's a wide variety. So just go find people you can share your feelings with and love.' "

Gallagher is 34, a handsome man with a quick smile who lives on full disability in a subsidized housing project in New Rochelle, N.Y. In the seven years since his suicide attempt, he has become something of a local resource for suicide-prevention groups, giving talks at schools, producing and being host for a weekly cable show, "Mr. Ed's Corral," and directing a nonprofit self-help group, Alive to Thrive.

On Tuesday night, he will go national, as the featured profile in an absorbing HBO documentary, "Suicide Notes." Yet for all his use to others, he is still trying to understand fully the guilt that drove him to become a star athlete and then a wreck.

Gallagher grew up in Valhalla, N.Y., gawky and stick-thin until high school when he pumped himself into an all-county, all-state defensive lineman. He went to the University of Pittsburgh on a full athletic scholarship, and there he was switched to offense.

"I was a sports hero, but please don't look beneath the surface; I can't handle it," he said. "No one ever got close. I was moody; sometimes I lashed out. I was so confused: who am I, what am I supposed to do, I've got these thoughts and feelings a jock isn't supposed to have and these sexual fantasies about men as well as women."

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Gallagher read "The David Kopay Story" (Arbor House, 1977) in quick, furtive bursts in the library, glancing over his shoulder. Kopay put into words the feelings that Gallagher had suppressed: the terrible shame of homoerotic thoughts in a sport so outwardly contemptuous of homosexuals; the emotional isolation; the need to prove "manliness" through heterosexuality, drinking and reckless play, and the awareness that football itself was a sexual release.

Kopay's story was powerful and ground-breaking, but SportsWorld has effectively kept gay athletes in the closet, a message Gallagher understood. He remained caught between his jock image and his shaky sense of self. He felt he could talk to no one.

"Refusing to share your feelings is like swallowing sticks of dynamite," Gallagher said. "Sooner or later, something is going to come along and detonate them."

Gallagher was redshirted at Pitt and became a starter in his junior year. He graduated in 1980, and that summer he tried out for the Jets. He was cut after two weeks.

"That was kind of a relief," he said. "I thought that now I could get on with my life, try something new, move away from football."

Gallagher never moved far from jockdom; he took jobs as a bouncer and as a furniture mover. On his own, he published a book on offensive-line play, "Hey, Meat Men!" He kept swallowing sticks of dynamite. His poetry was a cry for help. The opening lines of "The Mourning of That Evening" were these:

He used to be a big star.

But then he slipped down under.

Finally, in early 1985, "tanked up on wine," he cruised Greenwich Village bars until he found a man who "coaxed" him into his first homosexual experience. He liked it. But the next morning he felt "filthy" and he "breathed through ice for 12 miserable days" before going off the top of the dam, two miles from his high school football field.

"I don't know if I want to grow old in this chair," Gallagher said. "I have gay flings, but I haven't discounted the possibility of getting married to a woman someday. I don't want to be just Ed the Suicide Guy. I hate labels. I hated having to be Big Ed, the strong, silent jock. I wanted to be a clown, a friend, a poet."

The poetry is certainly more positive:

Yesterday

My mouth went wild

And I

Spilled my guts all over the place

And you know what?

Today still came

And I still breathe. . . .

A version of this article appears in print on January 12, 1992, on Page 8008011 of the National edition with the headline: BACKTALK; Search for Sensitivity Means Leaving Jock Label Behind. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe